1 Big Idea to Think About

  • We all have experiential intelligence that we can leverage in our personal lives and our professional lives to make it easier to reach our highest point of contribution.

2 Ways You Can Apply This

  • Make a list of visceral experiences that have impacted your life. They can be large or small experiences, and ask yourself what you learned from these experiences. Share what you have learned with a trusted friend or partner.
  • Next, ask what abilities these experiences have allowed you to develop in your life.

3 Questions to Ask

  • What experiences left a mark on my life?
  • What did I learn from these experiences?
  • What abilities have these experiences helped me to develop that can be useful in my life now and going forward?

Key Moments From the Show 

  • XQ – the new intelligence (3:49)
  • How to rethink intelligence (6:15)
  • Finding growth through our challenges and trauma (10:25)
  • Life is happening for you, not to you (13:28)
  • Making sense of our past experiences and leveraging them into strengths (15:10)
  • Translating life experience to professional experience (18:35)
  • The rising focus on experiential intelligence (23:05)
  • How to turn your experiences into useful assets (25:17)
  • The amplification of experiential intelligence (33:15)
  • The future of XQ (35:45)

Links and Resources You’ll Love from the Episode

Connect with Soren Kaplan

Twitter | Website | LinkedIn |

Greg McKeown:

Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I’m here with you on this journey to learn how to make our highest contribution. 

Have you ever felt you had more life experience and talent than your job requires or even allows you to use? Today, I’ve invited Soren Kaplan to the show to talk about how you can better tap into that experience yourself and also in the people around you. 

I’ve long believed that what we know about other people is less valuable than what we don’t know. That there’s an enormous amount of potential under the surface. What’s not on someone’s resume? What’s not in their current job title? And our ability to mine that experience in ourselves and in other people is, Kaplan believes, a predictor of our success. First, we had IQ; then, we had emotional intelligence, EQ. This is XQ, experiential intelligence. Let’s get to it. 

If you want to learn faster, understand more deeply, and increase your influence, teach the ideas in this podcast episode to someone else within the next 24 to 48 hours. 

Soren, welcome.

Soren Kaplan:

Thanks, Greg. Good to be here. 

Greg McKeown:

How are you? 

Soren Kaplan:

I’m doing great. It’s great to be on your podcast. I just listened to you and Amy Edmondson talking about psychological safety, so I think we’re going to have some good riff on that as well.

Greg McKeown:

What caught your attention from that conversation?

Soren Kaplan:

Well, you know, if you want to get connected to your own experiences and what shaped you and kind of made you who you are, you need to be vulnerable with yourself and then share that with other people. And that’s what psychological safety’s all about, and that’s what experiential intelligence is all about too.

Greg McKeown:

I’m so curious about this term that you’ve identified experiential intelligence. Tell us what it is.

Soren Kaplan:

Well, you know, we’ve had IQ for over a hundred years, and we have in our society, and in our businesses, we think the smarter you are, the more successful you’ll be. And then, about 30 or 40 years ago, we got emotional intelligence introduced as a success factor. But in today’s disruptive world, where things are changing faster than ever, we have artificial intelligence. We have lots of organizational change and disruption. We need another way to understand what leads to success. It’s ultimately, it’s really about your experiences. But we haven’t had a way to really understand how experience leads to a form of intelligence that compliments IQ and EQ.

Greg McKeown:

What do you mean in really simple non, jargon language by experiential intelligence?

Soren Kaplan:

Okay. So you have experiences in your life from starting when you’re young, and they shape how you think your mindsets. They also shape what you end up doing typically and how you spend your time. So you develop certain abilities, and you develop certain knowledge and skills. And so those experiences impact us whether we know it or not. And they give us sort of a street smarts that everyone has, and we just need a way to recognize what those experiences have imparted onto us that gives us our ability to be successful.

Greg McKeown:

Okay. So you really are just talking about the value of the experiences that we have in life. You are saying there is a higher value attached to that than maybe the literature has suggested in the past. Is this the idea?

Soren Kaplan:

That’s the idea. And the word experiential intelligence came from the past president of the American Psychological Association, Robert Sternberg. And we’ve had in the literature things like the 10,000-hour rule and things like street smarts to sort of get at that notion. But our experiences can shape us and deliver subconscious assets that we are leveraging and also subconscious limitations that maybe get in our way. And so understanding what we mean by experiential intelligence, which are your mindsets, your abilities, and your know-how, helps us be more effective.

Greg McKeown:

Are you familiar with the book The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto?

Soren Kaplan:

I have not read that. No.

Greg McKeown:

You’re gonna love it when you read it. I’m just pulling up the intro. You’ll see why in a second. He says in the author’s note at the beginning of his book and John Gatto, by the way, is like the teacher of the year in New York City three times and the teacher of the year in New York state twice. And then, after all of that exceptional teaching in the classroom, pens an essay in the Washington Post that says, I quit, I think. And he spent the next 10 years writing what became the Underground History of American Education. He begins with this premise. He says, “the shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition. The mass dumbness, which justifies official schooling, first had to be dreamed of. It isn’t real.” 

What’s your reaction to that?

Soren Kaplan:

Totally agree with it. And the reason why is because if we broaden the view of intelligence, some people are good teaching other people, some people are good in using their body to navigate tools and sports and dance. Some people are good with understanding nature. There are different levels of intelligences that exist, and we need a way to understand what those unique gifts that are imparted to all of us through our experiences.

Greg McKeown:

Okay, so his basic premise beyond what I just read to you is the idea that if you don’t assume that people are dumb in the first place and that you don’t think, well, my job, therefore, is to pour all of my knowledge into this dumb vessel, you know, that is sort of the foundation of traditional schooling. Then what would you do instead? 

And what he found he would do as a teacher instead was give people actual experience right from the earliest possible moment. So that instead of saying to someone, let’s prepare you for the future, which is like a concept, they don’t even know what it means. You get them to actually go and see things and experience things firsthand. 

He uses an illustration of this Richard Branson’s mother, who famously drops him off when he was very young, I think younger than seven, and said, your job is to make it home. He’s this young child, completely vulnerable. People would never even dream of such a thing. And he takes hours and hours to get home. But by the time he’s home, he has, I think, if I’m using the term correctly, experiential intelligence. Because he now knows how the buses work. He knows that he can communicate with people. He understands where his home sits within the greater world. Is this experiential intelligence? 

Does this speak to you?

Soren Kaplan:

It absolutely is. And when you look at the research behind experiential intelligence that has converged, you’ve got psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. Experiential learning is what you’re talking about. 

So how do we learn, for example, to ride a bike? How much of our IQ is involved with learning how to ride a bike? It’s actually about experiencing it. And what is riding a bike? Just like Richard Branson’s experience, it imparts skills turning at the handlebars and learning to break also abilities. How do you anticipate bumps or ride defensively in traffic? Those are higher-order organizing mechanisms for your skills and then mindsets. So the mindset around riding a bike is I can use it for transportation like getting to school, or I can use it for socializing group rides, or I can use it for adventure. 

Richard Branson most likely developed a mindset around I can live with uncertainty, and I can figure it out. And then there are skills around just navigating the transportation system. But those experiences impart those three levels of things to us, and then we can use those and leverage them for the future.

Greg McKeown:

You share a story in the book where your mother suddenly says to you, we need to leave. They’re coming to get us. Can you tell me that story?

Soren Kaplan:

I wrote this book because after working with thousands of leaders around the world globally, I also looked inside at my own experiences, and I needed to reconcile some things. 

So I grew up in northern California. My mother, when I was three years old, developed a mental illness. When I was about 15, we had moved about 16 times, and my father was rarely home. So those things imparted onto me those experiences, some trauma, those traumas tied to some self-limiting beliefs I needed to overcome, and some struggles that I was having in life. 

And at the same time, I looked into those, and the flip side of overcoming your challenges is growth. And so what I looked at also was the positive psychology side of all of that and realized I learned how to live with uncertainty. I understood how to make decisions with very little data, which are the same things I’ve used when doing startups and navigating organizational cultures and deciphering body language in rooms when I’m facilitating groups and the same things, those very same things that impacted me negatively also delivered unique gifts when I learned how to look at my experiences more holistically.

Greg McKeown:

This is important because what you’re saying is there was an asset that you gained through your experience, and even negative experiences can produce assets, and so the assets are what you mean when you say experiential intelligence or XQ. Am I hearing it right?

Soren Kaplan:

You are hearing it absolutely right.

Greg McKeown:

What is the primary reason somebody listening to this needs to understand that distinction?

Soren Kaplan:

You have two choices around looking at your experience. You can decide to heal from it and look at it and overcome some of the challenges. And that’s just, that’s fine. You can do that. A lot of people go to therapy, a lot of people have coaches, you do work on yourself, and you grow. That’s all good. 

And then you have another choice. You can look at the assets that it gave to you that maybe have been flying under the radar that you can use for your own leadership. And then you can understand that everyone has those same assets, not the same exact assets, but everyone has the opportunity to look at their experiences to uncover those assets. 

So if you’re leading teams, if you’re leading organizations, you have an opportunity to look into people’s experiences, personal experiences, work experiences, because we all bring our whole selves to work, whether we are walking in the front door or the home office door, whether we know it or not. And we can leverage those assets in new ways. And we have not had language, nor have we had tools to be able to really more deeply leverage people’s assets to achieve collective goals. Organizational goals, team…

Greg McKeown:

Just this last weekend, I spent time in the city where I spent most of my years growing up and drove past my primary school, middle school, and high school. It was a nostalgic experience, but it also brought all sorts of experiences back into my mind, and some of them not very comfortable. And I had a very distinct thought come to me in the midst of it. These experiences were exactly the things that I needed to be able to go on and do the things that I needed to do. It was a precise illustration of the much-quoted idea that life is happening for you, not to you. I think that’s what you are trying to codify here, what you are getting from those experiences so that you can better tap into them within yourself, but also within all the people around you and all of the experiences that they have had that are also now happening for them. To them.

Soren Kaplan:

You’re spot on. If we want to take ourselves, our teams and our organizations, and even our communities to the next level, we need to look at those types of experiences and the fact that we all have experiences, we all have that experiential intelligence, how do we bring it out and honor it and appreciate it and recognize it in ourselves and other people. It’s empowering to recognize it in ourselves. It’s empowering for other people to be seen. And when that happens, we can not just appreciate and empower, but we can actually realize there’s real assets, there’s real strengths that have been flying under the radar that are useful.

Greg McKeown:

One of the things you share in the book is, you know, the sum of your experiences is a common catchphrase, but what does it really mean? And your job in your research and now in what you’re writing is to help us to know what that means to be able to do that in more tangible ways than just bumping into them at some point and going, oh well, that’s helpful. I guess I did have that experience, and that will help me in this way. Am I understanding it correctly?

Soren Kaplan:

Yes. And a couple of tangible examples of this. I recently spoke with a woman named Santi Remesh. Santi was just named as one of the top 40 chief marketing officers in the world. And she was at Hershey and expanded their international business and was recognized for that. 

And I asked Santi what was it about her experience not at work that led her to be so successful? And her comment to me was that it’s because she played violin from a young age. And I asked her what she meant by that. And she said that by playing violin, she had to become incredibly focused, and also she’s a composer. So she tapped into her creative side, and when she’d play with other people, she would need to lead sometimes yet pull back at other times. And that experience allowed her to sort of innately show up at Hershey and learn when to lead and when to pull back and then let her teams run with ideas and drive innovation, that skillset that she has, those abilities, even the mindset she recognized as contributing to her success. And in that conversation, that became much more tangible to her and to me, which then represents an opportunity to leverage that in her future work and help bring that out in the team she’s working with.

Greg McKeown:

And then you said there was another example.

Soren Kaplan:

I recently hired an intern. I run a software company called praxie.com, and I met a woman 22 years old and she had no work experience. I met her through a family friend, and she said she wanted an internship and asked her what she had done, and she said she hasn’t worked, but she was in the military for a couple of years, and she had also moved from the US to Israel as a middle schooler. I asked her how she was able to adapt to a new culture, and she said she didn’t speak the language. She just had to dive in and do it. And then I asked her how in her two years of military service, she actually became a leader of a 20-person battalion. And I asked her how she learned how to lead, and she said she had to figure it out. And then she had just returned from six months traveling in India alone because she’s an adventurer. 

I realized that there were some assets there around making the best of a situation and adapting to other cultures. I hired her as an intern and, in a few months, brought her on, and she was managing a global team in Europe, Africa, and the US, developing best practice software processes because she had those skills. But no one would’ve given her an opportunity like that just because of her resume. That’s her life experience.

Greg McKeown:

So you are talking about how to translate these people’s experience, whether it happens to be in this exact industry or in business at all, and still be able to tap into it all of the assets outside of what’s written on a resume that can be put to utilization in this case in an organization. It reminds me of when I was working at Hydrick and Struggles; we were talking about this just before we came on the air. You were at HP at the time. Our paths didn’t cross to our recollection, but I was helping to do assessments of the top executives for Mark Hurd, who was the CEO at the time, as part of his execution initiative. And the senior most consultant in the organization, in the leadership consulting organization that I was a part of, had spent something like 20 years doing these assessments for the most senior leaders all over the world, very experienced in that ability. And I watched him do an assessment once, and I just was like, oh, what he’s doing is restating all their experiences in terms of translating them into competencies. And that was his whole journey was doing. I think exactly what you’re saying. I think he’s a master of exactly what you are also a master of, which is making this translation. What am I getting wrong here?

Soren Kaplan:

I think you’re getting it right. And when you think about competencies, we have had a word to talk about things we’re good at. We just haven’t had a direct line of sight. Usually, those are business competencies. We haven’t had a line of sight to life’s experience, lived experience, plus work experience.

Greg McKeown:

One hundred percent

Soren Kaplan:

Pulling it all together in a simple framework, mindsets, abilities, and know-how. And those are the things that are needed to understand, like what are we all bringing to the party?

Greg McKeown:

Well, there’s something really blind and foolish about the existing norms. For example, judging someone’s entire competence base based on their current work title. I mean, that’s an illustration to me, right? What we don’t know about people is more interesting than what we do know about them. But you are trying to help us go beyond that idea to being able to actually utilize people for the experiences they actually have, whether it’s in a workplace or not.

Soren Kaplan:

It starts at a very deep cultural level where we want to quantify everything we believe. If you have a high IQ, you’re gonna be more successful in business, in life, is the assumption. If you have high test scores and you’re successful in school, you’ll be more successful at work. And I think there are many examples where that’s not the case that those things, they may have some connection, but really in the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot of other things that come into play that are based on experience.

Greg McKeown:

Of course, there is, right? Like what you’re saying, of course, that’s true. It’s let’s add to the measurement factor, it’s the resume norm, send me your resume, and we know how those are supposed to be. This is what your work experience is from this date to this and what your main accomplishments were. And as far as I can see, it’s something like a misinformation game, not the full story about what goes on in the organization, and the person being interviewed is trying to name those things that they have done professionally that are most like this job. I mean, it’s just so surface of an interaction, and in my head, I now imagine a resume; I don’t necessarily mean literally, but a resume that is here is my life, these are the challenges I went through, here’s the trauma I’ve gone through. Here are all the things I didn’t expect to happen to me. Imagine if we could get access to all of that and had ability, you are talking about to translate that into how would that be useful here and now.

Soren Kaplan:

I love it. And here’s some stats that I think are supporting exactly what you’re saying needs to happen because I think it will happen. Some stats: the percentage of jobs requiring a college degree in the US fell from 51% in 2017 to just 44% in 2021. And the percentage of US adults ages 18 to 29 who view college education as quote-unquote very important dropped from 74% to 41% in the last six years. And that’s a Gallup poll, meaning more younger people don’t believe that college education is very important anymore to be successful, meaning more companies are dropping the requirement of a college degree to as a gatekeeping mechanism to get your foot in the door. But if we’re dropping those things and we see college as less important, what do we replace it with? How do we think about capturing and articulating, and demonstrating the assets that we bring or the assets that we wanna hire into the organization?

Greg McKeown:

This makes sense, and in one sense, it’s overdue. I’m doing more formal education right now, and I’m enjoying the opportunity. But yet again, I find that the experience of being in Cambridge, England, and traveling while I’m here and being in libraries and reading and thinking all outside of the formal education is much more valuable than the experience I’m having it in. And I’m not trying to criticize anybody. It’s just the informal experience is more valuable than the formal experience. That is my observation personally. And, of course, this is happening the world over. 

So in order to make good on the basic value proposition of experiential intelligence, you have to be able to do what you are talking about now, though; you have to be able to actually look at all of your experiences, the positive and the what you would think of as negatives and translate those into useful assets. And so we need you to teach us exactly how to do that.

Soren Kaplan:

There’s a couple ways to do it, and it requires that you get in touch with your experiences. So which are those experiences that you believe had an impact on you? And that can be a significantly big impact, or it can be a, what I call a a little “i”, a little impact. 

You talked about walking by your school. My guess is there was nothing, you know, maybe nothing traumatic, but you had some experiences that left some emotional residue there that may or may not be influencing you today. So the first step, super easy, inventory your experiences.

Greg McKeown:

You say that’s super easy, but I need you to break that down for me. Inventory your experiences.

Soren Kaplan:

Okay, well, think about those things that come to mind with the question. What are the most poignant experiences you’ve had in your life?

Greg McKeown:

Positive or negative? Positive doesn’t matter or negative. Okay. Doesn’t matter. What are the things that have had the biggest impact on me on my life so far?

Soren Kaplan:

Those things and those things, if you have trouble thinking about them or conjuring them up, think about things that have some type of emotional content to them for you, positive, joyous, or negative, shame, fear, embarrassment, those are the things.

Greg McKeown:

And you’d include trauma in that list, would you?

Soren Kaplan:

Of course. Sure. Yep.

Greg McKeown:

So extremes are welcome on this list. And you just what? Just write out the list?

Soren Kaplan:

Create a little chart. The way I do it is I look at it like a three-column table. What’s my experiences? Okay, what are the messages then that those experiences delivered to me or I took on because of them? 

I’ll give you an easy, simple example. In my own case, I went to purchase a car with my father as a teenager, and it was the typical used car salesman type experience and it was tense, and I could see my father getting kind of agitated, and it actually, I learned later that this car dealership was sort of notorious for bait and switch tactics. 

I had an experience. It was a small experience, it lasted 15 minutes, but I became very weary and fearful of people trying to sell me things. And so when I, in, I’m sure I have not been pleasant to people who are salespeople just trying to help me out, but it conjures up what I call a visceral memory. It’s a small little memory, but I get a little bit triggered when I’m in a sales situation, and I needed to look at that experience so that I could show up if I felt like someone was selling me something. It wasn’t necessarily a negative thing. Maybe they were trying to help, or maybe there was a great partnership opportunity happening.

Greg McKeown:

But step one, if there’s the three columns you’re suggesting, step one is visceral experiences that distinguishes a proper Google search in my mind. It’s not just, your experience is not just even emotional visceral experiences. They left a mark. Got it. Then number two is you said, what did I learn from it? What do you mean by that?

Soren Kaplan:

It’s a subtlety. So in my example, I’m sitting there, I have this used car salesman experience, the message I took away from that and you, everyone has to decide what the messages that they took away from it. The message I took away was people who are trying to sell me something cannot be trusted. And then I take that, and I can look at then how does that play out? Or how has that played out in my behavior in my life? Has it gotten in my way?

Greg McKeown:

So that’s column. That’s column three.

Soren Kaplan:

Column three.

Greg McKeown:

Okay. Has that belief been a useful belief to me or an unhelpful belief?

Soren Kaplan:

Correct. We’re at the mindset level at this point, right? Okay. So you can look at whether though that behavior from your visceral experiences to those messages, to those beliefs that you hold and how they have played out in your behavior are either look at that chart which are serving you well, which are not. 

Greg McKeown:

Okay. And then what?

Soren Kaplan:

What it can be helpful. This is the tie back to psychological safety. It can be helpful to share that list with other people. You can understand yourself better from that lens and understand what have those behaviors led to. And let’s go back down to the list. We’re at the mindset level right now. Okay. What have they led you to do or not do? So when I look at my example with the salesperson, I had two things that were imparted into me. One is I can’t trust salespeople. And that was one of them. But the second mindset was I need to understand the motivations of people when I interact with them.

Greg McKeown:

Okay, so that’s the positive mindset. I need to understand the real motivation of people when I’m talking to them. Good, I like that. I got it. What would be in the next column?

Soren Kaplan:

So the next column would be abilities. I’ve developed some abilities to empathize with other people and understand their motivations. That’s a higher-order ability.

Greg McKeown:

You can read them. Okay. And then the third column?

Soren Kaplan:

Is my knowledge and skills – know-how. And in that example, my know-how is I have learned how to be interviewing in a way that I can ask people questions and see their reactions to questions and decipher their motivations. So it’s the tactical things that I know how to do interviewing, or I can facilitate a meeting and be able to organize the meeting in ways that I can get insight into what people’s motivations are because of how I facilitate.

Greg McKeown:

Is there any rule of thumb for how many items to have on there? It doesn’t really matter. It’s just as much as you want to analyze your own life.

Soren Kaplan:

There’s no rule of thumb, but I usually like a discreet number five to seven at the most so that you can get started with something manageable.

Greg McKeown:

Okay, so I got it. Don’t get overwhelmed by this. Start with the things that really come to your mind, then what do you do with it?

Soren Kaplan:

I encourage people to share it with other people they trust. Now, if you’re in a team or an organization, it may or may not be appropriate to share certain items just yet, depending on the culture of your team. But a lot of people have coaches, a lot of people have partners, a lot of people have colleagues that they do trust and they can be vulnerable with. And this is where that psychological safety principle comes into play, right? Because sometimes the lens that we have on ourselves when we say, here’s my abilities and know-how, actually, other people see other things in us that can be revealing. And so, I encourage a lot of sharing

Greg McKeown:

And to share, but to ask them, what do you see that I’m good at on these things that may have come from these experiences? So they’re helping to enrich it, round it out so that it’s a more useful document to you is that’s the intent.

Soren Kaplan:

That’s right. And then there’s an opportunity to understand your own experiential intelligence and the assets that it gave to you, to figure out based on the goals you have, the challenges you’re facing, the opportunities you want to go after. How do you bring forth specific assets and leverage those to do what you wanna do? And once I understand that for myself, it’s very difficult to go back. The Pandora’s box is open.

Greg McKeown:

You can’t go back into your original packaging,

Soren Kaplan:

You cannot. You have grown, and you have developed. And we are all in relationships with other people. That is life. When we see ourselves with a strengths-based positive psychology lens, we start to see other people the same way, and we can value what they bring, or we can help them bring it out. I call that amplification of experiential intelligence. There’s no going back. We’re in a team, and we want to share our assets and our experiences, and we see ourselves in that way. We then can offer up the same honoring of those strengths and understanding of those assets with others and bring that out. And then you start to really create a positive feedback loop and flywheel.

Greg McKeown:

Yes. So this is now phase two of the value proposition. You’re doing it yourself, you can communicate that out, but now the 10 x part of it comes because every single person you meet, whatever their current title, whatever the awful things of their lives have been, you can start to recognize the assets that person will inevitably have as a result of the challenges that they’ve gone through. And suddenly, the world is much richer than it was before. Is this, what’s your reaction?

Soren Kaplan:

Spot on. And an example, I was working with a Fortune 1000 company, three different departments in one business unit coming together, a hundred people in the room, and a single pre-work activity, which was what are the most poignant experiences that shaped me as a person and then what are the strengths that I’m bringing to the party? It was the simplified version of what you just said, right? They all came together, paired them up into pairs, they shared their stories, then had those pairs get into groups of three pairs of six people, they shared their stories. And by the end of a very short amount of time, about an hour, each of those pods of six people had a list of the assets they were collectively bringing to the organization. And then, when we looked across that, we had a themed set of competencies or capabilities that this organization had to leverage and use to implement its strategy.

Greg McKeown:

I love that. What haven’t we covered? What actionable insight haven’t we covered so far?

Soren Kaplan:

I believe that when we start to look at experience in a more formal way as a formal form of intelligence that compliments IQ compliments EQ, we start to recognize that there are implications for education, for parenting, for creating experiences. As a leader in our organizations, we start to realize that experiences are life, and those experiences are constantly shaping us, and we are impacting other people’s experiences all the time. And so there are lots of implications for this that I haven’t developed yet, but I believe they represent huge opportunities for research, for assessments, for tools and templates to help in various ways. And I think that we’re on the tip of the iceberg around this topic.

Greg McKeown:

The idea that the only experience that counts is the experience you’ve been paid to have seems utterly insane to me. And yet that is really the working norm of the entire interview process and then the general way of operating even after someone is working in an organization because we think of them only through their title. So it’s almost like it’s only their experience in this job since we met them that matters. And this is the tip of a massive iceberg. I love this hope that you really started with that it’s inevitable that this is going to start becoming a utilized way of thinking because, for a start, so many industries now need talent that is not readily available from the normal flow of talent. Thinking now of the entire hospitality industry post Covid, I’m thinking of manufacturing as a pretty broad statement, do not have sufficient talent to fill the needs that they have. They’re going to have to get better at finding people with experience to do the work that they need, that doesn’t have the traditional formal journey to getting there. This is a marvelous conversation, and I’ll give you the final word.

Soren Kaplan:

Well, we all have experiential intelligence, and we all have an opportunity to tap into it and leverage it in our personal lives and our professional lives. And I really appreciate, Greg, you completely got it. You completely see the disconnect that exists today, and you see the opportunity.

Greg McKeown:

Soren Kaplan, thanks for being on the podcast. A real pleasure.

What is one idea that stood out to you today? What is one thing you can do differently in the next 24 to 48 hours? And who is somebody you can invite to be with you on this journey, to listen to the podcast, and to be able to help you in implementing these ideas in your life so that you can live a life that really matters? 

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Thank you. Really thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.